All entries for March 2015

Group, then Threaten: How Bad Ideas Move Millions

Writing about web page http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2014.0719

I've been thinking: What is it that enables a bad idea suddenly to spread across millions of people? Here are some of the things I have in mind:

• In France the National Front is reported as leading all other parties in current opinion polls, having won barely 10 percent of the vote in the 2007 presidential election.
• In January's general election, nearly 40 percent of Greek voters supported Syriza, compared wtih fewer than 5 percent as recently as 2009.
• Since narrowly rejecting indendence in last year's referendum, Scotland's voters have rallied to the Scottish National Party, support for which is now reported at over than 40 percent compared with less than 20 percent at the last general election.
• Most spectacularly, more than 80 per cent of Russians are regularly reported as thinking Vladimir Putin is doing a great job as their president, compared with around 60 percent two years ago.

I am hardly the first to ask this question. There is plenty of research (e.g. de Bromhead et al. 2013) on the economic conditions that foster political extremism, for example. But how do we get from economic conditions to wrong persuasion, exactly? There is the famous Goebbels quote about the "big lie," which is fine as far as it goes but always makes me think: surely there's more to it than this?

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

But it can't be true of all lies. Don't some lies work better than others? What is it that defines the ones that work? My best answer so far to this question is an analogy, which I know is less than proof. But it's a thought-provoking analogy; see what you think.

Last year some behavioural scientists (Strõmbom et al. 2014) finally explained how to herd sheep. There is a sheepdog, instructed by a shepherd, that does the running around. It turns out that there are just two stages. First, the dog must gather the sheep in a single compact group. Once that is done, the second step is to threaten the group from one side; as a group, the sheep will move away from the threat in the opposite direction. That's all there is to it.

The reason why the first step must come first is also of interest: If the dog threatens the sheep without first gathering them in a group, they will scatter in all directions, and that's not what the shepherd wants.

Anyway, there's the answer: Group, then threaten.

People are not sheep, and this is only an analogy. Nonetheless you probably already worked out how I would read this. The shepherds are the political leaders. The dogs that run around for them are the campaign managers and activists. The human equivalent of gathering sheep in a group is to polarize people around an identity that defines an in-group and an out-group. So Scots (as opposed to the English), Greeks (as opposed to the Germans), Russian speakers (as opposed to the rest). Group them, then threaten them, and they will move.

To see how the threat sets the group in motion we need one more thing, an insight from Ed Glaeser. Glaeser (2005) wanted to explain the conditions under which politicians become merchants of hate. He began with a community that has suffered some kind of collective setback. When that happens, people demand an explanation: Who has done this to us? "Us" means the in-group. Political entrepreneurs, he argued, will compete to supply satisfying stories. Often the most satisfying account is one that blames the in-group's misfortune on the alleged past crimes of some out-group: the English, the bankers, the Muslims, the Jews, or the West.

Not only past crimes, however; Glaeser uses the phrase "past and future crimes." In other words, he maintains, politicians often transform these stories into powerful threats by giving them a predictive slant: This is what they, the enemy, have done to us in the past and this is what they will do again if we don't mobilize to stop them first.

Remember: Group, then threaten. The result is mobilization.

References

• de Bromhead, Alan, Barry Eichengreen, and Kevin H. O'Rourke. 2013. Political Extremism in the 1920s and 1930s: Do German Lessons Generalize? Journal of Economic History 73/2, pp. 371-406. URL https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/jechis/v73y2013i02p371-406_00.html.
• Glaeser, Edward L. 2005. The Political Economy of Hatred. Quarterly Journal of Economics 120/1, pp. 45-86. URL: https://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/qjecon/v120y2005i1p45-86.html
• Strömbom, Daniel. Richard P. Mann, Alan M. Wilson, Stephen Hailes, A. Jennifer Morton, David J. T. Sumpter, and Andrew J. King. 2014. Solving the shepherding problem: heuristics for herding autonomous, interacting agents. J. R. Soc. Interface 11: 20140719. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2014.0719.

Mark Harrison : 23 Mar 2015 08:00 |  Tags: Greece History Politics Russia |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Monday Morning Muesli

On Friday I read yet another plaudit for Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Sleepwalkers? To judge from the title the great powers went to war in their sleep, without a conscious decision to do so, an interpretation that should let everyone off the hook. At least, the sleepwalking defence has been known to work in a criminal court for defendants accused of murder and rape, so I guess it could also cover the initiation of aggressive wars.

The Sleepwalkers has been sold across the world -- most notably in Germany, where it has been a best seller -- on its title and its great reviews. But the title continues to mystify me, for Clark does not appear to believe it himself. In his introduction (p. xxvii) he writes:

The story this book tells is ... saturated with agency. The key decision makers -- kings, emperors, foreign ministers, ambassadors, military commanders, and a host of lesser officials -- walked towards danger in watchful, calculated steps.

So, not asleep at all. And he concludes his book (pp. 561-562):

Did the protagonists understand how high the stakes were? [Yes, at some length]. They knew it ...

Again: not asleep. What's going on? You can't help wondering if this is a case of an author trapped by a working title that was written into the contract with his publisher before he knew what he would say. Maybe Clark felt he could rescue himself at the last moment by adding the words I missed off the end of the sentence that I just quoted:

They knew it, but did they really feel it?

Then, a brief allusion to the horrors of modern warfare, which those protagonists apparently did not "feel"; and the final sentence of the book:

In this sense the protagonists of 1914 were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world.

But the way I read this, Clark's complaint is not that these guys were asleep! It is rather that in the majority they were soldiers, trained (as John Keegan once described in The Face of Battle) to respond to the emergency of combat with military professionalism, not unsoldierly panic. When they foresaw horror and extinction with one part of their brain, they were thinking with the other half about how to manage it. And in that spirit they went to war.

It's an interesting point, and an important one, too, if you want to ask why the professional soldiers had such influence in the secret councils of Berlin, Vienna, and St Petersburg in the summer of 1914. But it has absolutely nothing to do with sleepwalking.

***

Thursday this week will see the Warwick Summit on Protest, which follows some unfortunate events that took place on campus at the end of last term. I wasn't a witness and I don't claim any special insight. I did respond to the survey that followed, along with 578 other staff and students of the university. The survey and responses have now been dissiminated behind the university firewall; here's mine. I don't plan to attend the summit, so this will be the limit of my contribution.

• Please tell us about any concerns you have in relation to protest on campus, including those relating to recent events?

There is a right to protest within the law. This right needs to be upheld. Protests on campus that go beyond that by involving trespass (occupations) or violence have been quite rare. The Warwick Summit should think carefully before basing general conclusions on things that happen infrequently.

• Please tell us if there is anything you would like to see done differently in relation to protest in the future?

While occupations and violent protests on campus have been rare, they are also polarizing events. In that setting emotion can override calculation, so that over-reaction on either or both sides is predictable. Those who exercise their right to protest should carefully consider the potential for violence in their actions. An example is occupations, which are always forceful (because they forcefully deny other people legitimate access to a space). Moreover, occupations avoid interpersonal violence only by exploiting surprise.

• Do you have any questions that you would like to see addressed at the summit?

In response to the December events I have heard demands for a self-policing campus (or "police off campus"). This would be a mistake. When crimes are committed, the victims have a right of access to the law. University officials, academics, and students are not trained for crime prevention or investigation, nor should they be. There will always be a need for police on campus.

Mark Harrison : 09 Mar 2015 08:00 |  Tags: Muesli |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Monday Morning Muesli

Writing about web page Nemtsov Putin KGB

According to Putin's spokesman Dmitrii Peskov, the Russian President considers that the murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was a contract killing with "all the signs of a provocation." This theory has been echoed faithfully by the chief of the investigative commission Vladimir Markin:

The murder could be a provocation to destabilize the political situation in the country, and the figure of Nemtsov could represent a kind of 'holy sacrifice' for those that don't shrink from any means to achieve their political goals.

(Remember that phrase: "holy sacrifice" (in Russian сакральная жертва).

These officials imply that Russian oppositionists murdered their own leader in order to cause chaos and create an opportunity to seize power. The investigators are also considering other motives, although none of them is the most obvious one, that someone had Nemtsov killed in order to remove the opposition's best known leader and intimidate those that remained.

That interpretation should not come as a surprise. Two years ago almost to the day, prime minister Putin was campaigning for election for Russia's president. At a meeting he addressed the context of public protests over the conduct of the election. Referring to the opposition, he said:

The ones that you mentioned, they want some clashes and are directing everything towards this goal. They are prepared even to put someone forward as a victim and blame the authorities for it ... They've been trying to do this for ten years, especially those that are sitting abroad. I'm telling you this exactly. This is what I know. They are even looking for a 'holy sacrifice' from among the prominent people. They themselves will go 'bang,' if you'll excuse me, and then they will blame the authorities.

And yes, Markin's words "holy sacrifice" are exactly the same as the words that his master used two years before. You have to wonder if they've been talking to each other.

***

The general effect is one more creepy echo from Russia's past. On 4 December 1934 a gunman entered the Leningrad communist party headquarters and assassinated Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad party chief. The circumstances strongly suggest some kind of official collusion: Someone above Kirov, which really means the NKVD or Stalin himself, either ordered the murder or knowingly allowed it to happen, but all those close to the deed were dead within a few days or months, and the documents in the archives have not settled the matter. Most likely we'll never know for sure.

We do know what happened next: Stalin immediately took personal charge of the investigation. Within days an official narrative began to emerge: the murderer was a terrorist acting on behalf of foreign powers and domestic traitors. The opposition had incited and organized the deed. Based on this conclusion, the Kirov murder became the pretext for ever-wdening circles of repression; many of the defendants in the show trials in Moscow and elsewhere in 1936 and 1937 were charged with complicity in Kirov's death, among many other fantastic crimes.

***

Recently I've been trying to learn about underground humour. In the process I came across a very nice paper by Elliott Oring, “Risky Business: Political Jokes under Repressive Regimes,” in Western Folklore 63(3) (2004), pp. 209-236. This paper has some wonderful material from a respondent called Klava, a Jewish woman from Odessa. Here's a story that I particularly liked:

Klava was born in 1948. She remembered growing up with political jokes. ‘It was a national past time.’ Odessans prided themselves on their jokes and on being good jokers, and this reputation was recognized by people from others parts of the country as well … But Klava was always aware that jokes and other kinds of discussions could not be freely shared. ‘It was a given ... You are not to repeat ... Only to your family members and your friends.’ Because there were very strict – though unofficial – quotas for Jews at the university, Klava, like many Jews seeking education and advancement, obtained her degree in engineering. She was employed at a large firm, but she eventually quit her job, and became a manicurist. She planned to apply for permission to emigrate, and she knew that once she applied, she would lose her engineering job. By obtaining a job as a manicurist before submitting her application, she could assure herself a source of income while awaiting permission. Nevertheless, she did not immediately apply as her family did not want her to leave.

In 1974, she was working in the shop and she had several clients who were waiting to have their nails done. One of her customers came in without an appointment. She needed to have her nails done because she was going on vacation. She had been Klava's customer for several years. Klava told her that she would do her nails if she would wait until she had finished with her scheduled customers. So while she worked on the other customers, the woman waited in the shop. 1974 was a celebratory year in the communist calendar – a Lenin anniversary – and Klava and her customers exchanged jokes and witticisms – many about Lenin …

Her unscheduled customer sat there the whole time that the jokes were being told. The rest is in Klava's words:

"After the two girls left and she was in the chair. And as I was working on her, she told me, ‘Klava, do you know who I am?’

"I said, ‘Of course, your name is Ludmilla Ivanovna.’ And she said, ‘Do you know where I work?’ ‘Of course, it's in the municipal hall.’ She said, ‘Do you know what department I work in?’ ‘I have no idea.’ ‘It's department number one,’ which was KGB. And the joke was said, it was Lenin's hundredth birthday, and so all the jokes were about it. [The customer then told the following joke.] ‘There was a competition for the best joke about Lenin. And the first prize is ten years to where Lenin used to go’ – jail, exile. And she looked at me and the smile disappeared from her face, and she told me, ‘If I did not value you as my manicurist, I would send you for ten years to where Lenin used to go.’ And that was a decisive moment, because I wanted to go [emigrate] like three years ago, and my family did not want me [to]. I was scared. I was very scared, more than in my whole life, before that or after that."

That night Klava called her family together and told them what had happened and that she was going to submit her application to emigrate. It only took her three months to get the permission, and then she had thirty days to leave the country. Her parents also applied to leave but they were refused, and she had to leave without them.

Mark Harrison : 02 Mar 2015 08:00 |  Tags: Muesli |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem